Matthew Calbraith Perry visited Japan twice, in July 1853 and the early spring of the following year. On the first visit he successfully delivered President Filmore's letter addressed to the Emperor of Japan to the Shogun's representatives at Kurihama on the 14th of July. Along with the Presidential communication asking for the opening of Japan, Perry presented his own “three” letters addressed to the Emperor of Japan. But according to the Japanese sources,
Dai Nihon ko monjo available since 1910 in a published form (Tokyo University Press), there was a “fourth” letter handed presumably on the same day to the Bakufu officials along with “two” white flags. The letter explained that in case of war between the United States and Japan, Japan was bound to be defeated. “Then Japan should ask for peace by hoisting the flags.”
Curiously enough, this piece of document has never been seriously considered in the historiography of U. S. -Japanese relations. Even at the height of the anti-American campaign of the post-Pearl Harbor years during the Pacific War, that intimidating letter of Perry's was never mentioned in Japanese literature. A natural question arises: How did this happen? One obvious reason, as was discovered in the course of research for this essay, was attributable to Perry himself. He destroyed it from all American sources to keep his record clean from having deviated from the President's explicit instructions not to resort to hostile actions as the mission was for friendly relations.
No mention had ever been made of the letter and the flags in American literature until a partial exception was made by Peter Booth Wiley in 1990 based on an English translation from the Japanese documents noted above. The Japanese scholars who assumed that all the primary sources were apparently to be found in the United States duplicated the American writers' mistakes. Still it does not seem fully to answer the question why the Japanese writers, among them especially the specialists in American diplomacy toward Japan, had not become aware of the existence of the document in two versions of Japanese translation in a published form since 1910.
There are many conceivable reasons. But one outstanding cause which this essay explores concerns Inazo Nitobe. In his virgin book,
The Intercourse between The United States and Japan: A Historical Sketch (The Johns Hopkins University, 1891), he came close enough to disclosing the threatening letter of Perry's but refrained from doing so. He presented even a Japanese document which had an explicit reference to the “white flags, ” but from his abridged English translation, Nitobe chose to drop the reference even by distorting the meaning of the paragraph. In his mind U. S. -Japanese relations were much too precious to be adversely affected by the reminder of such an episode. His students of American studies at the Imperial University of Tokyo in the 1910's and their students after them must have accepted it as a tradition.
It is indeed proverbial that while Perry destroyed a historical document for the preservation of his own honor and his illustrious family's record in U. S. history, Nitobe and his students kept it away from public knowledge for the sake of Japan's smooth passage into a “civilized and enlightened” modern nation in friendship and “mutual understanding” with the American nation.
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